Culture of ancient Rome

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The culture of ancient Rome stretched across nearly 1,200 years of history and at its peak reached from what is now Lowland Scotland and Morocco all the way to the Euphrates. At the center of it all sat a single city so vast and so densely packed that its population may well have exceeded one million people. That made Rome the largest megalopolis of its time. And yet, the story of Roman civilization is not simply the story of one city. It is the story of how a people absorbed, transformed, and projected ideas, religions, languages, and laws across three continents. How did a society built on conquest also build lasting systems of governance, worship, and art? What made Roman culture so durable that fragments of it persist today in the languages we speak, the laws we follow, and the buildings that still stand in city centers across Europe and the Middle East? Those are the questions this documentary explores.

• 2. City Life and Social Order

  ›

  The vast majority of Rome's urban population lived not in fine houses but in insulae, the cramped apartment blocks that filled the city center. Beneath the population packed into those buildings ran a rigid hierarchy. At its foundation was the institution of patria potestas, or "paternal power," which granted the pater familias absolute authority over his wife, his nephews, his slaves, and his freedmen. He could dispose of them and their goods at will.

  Slaves were legally classified as moveable property, described in Roman law as mancipia, meaning "kept in the master's hand." They were mostly prisoners of war, sold in open markets. By AD 4, the Lex Aelia Sentia had established minimum age limits for both owners and slaves before formal manumission could occur: twenty years for the owner and thirty for the slave.

  Plebeians who were neither slaves nor members of the patrician families occupied a legal gray zone. They had no legal capacity and could not make contracts on their own. The solution was the clientela, an arrangement in which a plebeian joined a patrician family in a legal sense and could conduct business through that family's pater familias. Whatever the plebeian acquired legally belonged to the gens, the patrician family unit.

  During the Republic, founded in 509 BC, citizens could vote, but that category excluded women, slaves, and children. Voting was organized through two main assemblies. The comitia centuriata divided Romans by age, wealth, and residence into a total of 373 centuries, and elected the praetors, the censors, and the consuls. The comitia tributa, made up of thirty-five tribes, elected the quaestors and the patrician curule aedile. Each century and each tribe held a single vote, regardless of its size.

• 3. Food, Drink, and Daily Ritual

  ›

  From the founding of the Republic until around 200 BC, Romans ate simply. The morning meal, ientaculum, consisted of bread, salad, olives, cheese, fruits, nuts, and cold meat left over from the previous night. Lunch was prandium, and dinner was cena. Dessert was called secunda mensa, meaning "second table."

  Wine only became common or mass-produced around 250 BC. Cato the Elder, writing in his agricultural manual De agri cultura, argued that the vineyard was the most important feature of a good farm. Wine was never drunk straight; it was always mixed with water, even at comissatio, the evening drinking events where a designated arbiter bibendi, or "judge of drinking," determined the ratio of wine to water. Common ratios were 1:2, 1:3, or 1:4. Estimates place male daily wine consumption in Rome at 0.8 to 1.1 gallons. Even Cato the Elder, known for strict views, recommended distributing a daily ration of low-quality wine of more than 0.5 gallons to slaves working on farms.

  Drinking unmixed wine on an empty stomach was considered a mark of alcoholism, and Romans recognized both its physical and psychological effects. In the highly gossipy society of the city, an accusation of alcoholism was a damaging political weapon. Cicero and Julius Caesar both used it to discredit rivals. The emperor Tiberius earned the nickname Biberius Caldius Mero from his own soldiers, which roughly translates as "Boozer of Pure Wine," a detail recorded by Suetonius. Cato the Younger was also known as a heavy drinker, frequently found stumbling home in the early hours.

  During the Imperial period, lower-class Romans, the plebeians, subsisted mainly on vegetable porridge and bread, with fish, meat, olives, and fruits appearing only occasionally. Subsidized or free food was sometimes distributed in cities. Patrician households hosted elaborate dinner parties with dancing girls and wines, though women and children originally ate separately.

• 4. Language and Its Long Reach

  ›

  Latin began as the native language of Rome, one branch of the Indo-European family, highly inflectional in its early forms and relying on a system of affixes rather than word order to convey meaning. Its alphabet derived from the Old Italic script, which in turn came from the Greek alphabet. That same Latin alphabet is still used today to write most European languages and many others beyond Europe.

  In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, Greek served as the main lingua franca, a status it had held since the time of Alexander the Great. Latin was largely confined to Roman administration and the military in those regions. Over centuries, Greek supplanted Latin entirely in the Eastern Roman Empire, which continued as the Byzantine Empire. Meanwhile, in the west, the various forms of Vulgar Latin spoken across different provinces began shifting into distinct local tongues starting around the 9th century. French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish all grew from those roots.

  English followed a more complicated path. Though Britannia was a Roman province, the Roman presence had effectively disappeared before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. When William the Conqueror arrived from Normandy in 1066, he brought retainers who spoke Anglo-Norman French, a Romance language. The English upper classes used Anglo-Norman French for centuries afterward, and Latinate vocabulary flooded into Middle English during this period. The Renaissance later added more, as scholars consciously borrowed directly from Classical Latin authors.

  Latin did not simply vanish after Rome fell. It survived through Ecclesiastical Latin, which became the traditional language of the Roman Catholic Church and remains one of the official languages of the Vatican City. In the Humanist movement of the Renaissance, more Classical forms reemerged. Latin held its place as western Europe's shared academic and diplomatic language until French displaced it in the 19th century and English did so in the 20th.

• 5. Literature and the Written Word

  ›

  Roman literature never emerged in isolation. From its earliest surviving works, which are historical epics about Rome's military past, it drew heavily on Greek models. Cato the Elder stands as the first Roman to write history in Latin, though he was theoretically opposed to Greek cultural influence. He still wrote the first Greek-inspired rhetorical textbook in Latin and produced the Origines, a chronicle running from the legendary Aeneas to his own era. That work is now lost. In 123 BC, a formal state effort produced the Annales maximi, which ran to eighty books and recorded official events year by year.

  Poetry held a different prestige in the ancient world than it does today. Quintilian, the greatest Roman authority on education, wanted secondary schools to center their curriculum on poetry, reserving prose for what would now be called the university stage. Virgil produced the Aeneid at the request of Maecenas, telling the story of Aeneas's flight from Troy and his settlement of the city that would become Rome. Lucretius used epic verse to explain science in his On the Nature of Things. Ovid's Metamorphoses worked in dactylic hexameter to cover mythology from the creation of the earth to his own time. Classical critics noted that Ovid's work lacked the gravitas of traditional epic.

  Catullus was the first Roman poet to produce what appeared to be autobiographical love poetry, depicting a relationship with a woman he called Lesbia. Under Emperor Domitian, Martial built a reputation as a writer of epigrams that were often blunt attacks on public figures.

  Sixteen books of Cicero's letters survived, all published after his death by his secretary Tito. They offer a view of social life during the final years of the Republic and reveal, in the estimation of those who have studied them, a personality that was vain, vacillating, and snobbish. Cicero's longing for political life in Rome comes through most sharply in letters written during his periods of exile and his time as provincial governor in Asia Minor.

• 6. Religion and Imperial Power

  ›

  Romans understood their success as a world power to be the direct result of collective piety, which they called pietas, the diligent maintenance of good relations with the gods. According to their own legendary history, most of Rome's religious institutions traced back to Numa Pompilius, the Sabine second King of Rome, who was said to have negotiated with the gods directly.

  There was no concept of separation between religious and civic life. During the Republic, which lasted from 509 BC to 27 BC, the same men who held elected political office served as augurs and pontiffs. Julius Caesar became pontifex maximus before he was elected consul. The augurs interpreted divine will and supervised the marking of boundaries, a practice that Romans understood as sanctioning their territorial expansion. As a result of the Punic Wars, which ran from 264 to 146 BC, magistrates built many new temples in fulfillment of vows made to deities in exchange for military success.

  The system was contractual by nature, based on the Latin principle do ut des, meaning "I give that you might give." Religion required correct practice of prayer, ritual, and sacrifice, not personal faith. As many as 135 days of the year in the Imperial Era were devoted to religious festivals and games called ludi.

  As the Empire expanded, Rome generally absorbed the deities of conquered peoples rather than suppressing them. Gods and local deities were worshipped side by side across the provinces. Deities including Cybele, Isis, Osiris, Serapis, Mithras, and Sol Invictus spread as far north as Roman Britain.

  The situation shifted sharply under Constantine. His formal conversion to Christianity in 312 is almost universally acknowledged by historians, though he was baptized only on his deathbed by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia in 337. A scholar quoted in the source, Hans Pohlsander, Professor Emeritus of History at the University at Albany, SUNY, described Constantine's conversion as serving "an entirely conservative end, the preservation and continuation of the Empire." By 391, under Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity became the exclusive state church, displacing all other Christian denominations and the Hellenistic religions that had come before.

• 7. The Greek Undercurrent

  ›

  A persistent feature of Roman culture, from its architecture to its philosophy to its science, was the degree to which it rested on Greek foundations. Starting in the middle of the 2nd century BC, private Greek culture grew in influence despite complaints from conservative moralists about the "softening" effects of what they called Hellenized culture. By the time Augustus ruled, Greek household slaves were teaching Roman children, sometimes including girls. Chefs, decorators, secretaries, doctors, and hairdressers came from the Greek East. Greek sculptures filled Roman gardens and villas or were reproduced in Roman sculpture yards by Greek craftsmen.

  In science, the Roman preference was for practical application rather than theoretical inquiry. Roman concrete, known as opus caementicium, incorporated pozzolanic ash and made possible structures including the Pantheon, which contains one of the largest unreinforced concrete domes ever built. A road network spanning over 400,000 kilometers spread across the empire. But the underlying intellectual tradition remained largely Greek. The astronomer Ptolemy, whose geocentric models shaped navigation until the Renaissance, was a product of the Greek-speaking world. The physician Galen, of Greek-Anatolian origin, defined Western medical knowledge for more than a millennium. Sosigenes, whom Caesar consulted when creating the Julian calendar in 46 BC, was Greek. Even the writing materials Romans used, papyrus from Egypt and parchment from Asia Minor, came from the Greek-speaking east, the latter taking its name from the city of Pergamon.

  Emperor Trajan made the pattern explicit in a letter to Pliny the Younger, who as governor of Bithynia and Pontus had asked Rome to send an architect. Trajan replied that there was no shortage of competent architects anywhere, and added that skilled builders were accustomed to traveling from Greece to Rome, not the other direction. Roman jurists, too, drew from the east: Papinian, Ulpian, and Modestinus were not Latin in origin, and the great reorganization of Roman law in the Byzantine era was carried out by Tribonian, a jurist from Pamphylia. Even Christianity, which would eventually become the Empire's official faith, originated in the eastern provinces. The New Testament was written in Greek, and the first Church Fathers were Greek-speaking.